Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday September 14, 2012 @01:43PM
from the awesome-that's-the-century-i-live-in dept.

pacopico writes "Elon Musk has just come off a pretty amazing run. SpaceX docked with the ISS. Tesla has started selling its all-electric luxury sedan, and SolarCity just filed to go public. Bloomberg Businessweek spent a few days with Musk and got a look inside his insane factories in Silicon Valley and Los Angeles. It's like Willy Wonka time for geeks. Among the other proclamations in the story is Musk saying that he intends to die on Mars. 'Just not on impact.' Musk then goes on to describe a fifth mode of transportation he's calling the Hyperloop."

There's plenty of insanity being produced by other countries, available for import to the United States. But will the American consumer develop a taste for exotic insanity or prefer the home grown domestic stuff?

OK, so none of his enviable ventures have made money... I think PayPal could be one of the most universally loathed name in the tech community. Probably why it didn't show up in the summary, a good bit of/. would be trolling for "he's building rockets with money he stole from me" quips.

Has it always been? I quite liked it when it first started up. It was a decent way to pay for things online, knowing fairly well you wouldn't get completely screwed either way. The issue with them is really their more recent actions.

Has it always been? I quite liked it when it first started up. It was a decent way to pay for things online, knowing fairly well you wouldn't get completely screwed either way. The issue with them is really their more recent actions.

Paypal is a company that wants to act like a bank (handling deposits, exchanges, etc) but doesn't want to be regulated like a bank (in all the bad ways). This has been controversial from pretty much the start, but yes things have been escalating since Ebay bought the company from Musk and Thiel. One particularly contentious issue has always been their somewhat capricious handling of fraud (or what they constitute as fraud) and their refusal to allow appeals or arbitration, effectively setting their own rules on when they can decide to perpetually keep money that has been deposited to them.

PayPal is highly profitable. Even though Musk is no longer involved in the company, it helped to bankroll his future endeavors. SpaceX has the potential to be highly profitable, although its fortunes (at least initially) will be tied closely to the whims and political meanderings of NASA's budget.

PayPal is highly profitable. Even though Musk is no longer involved in the company, it helped to bankroll his future endeavors. SpaceX has the potential to be highly profitable, although its fortunes (at least initially) will be tied closely to the whims and political meanderings of NASA's budget.

According to TFA, SpaceX is _already_ profitable, with a backlog of orders.

Wait, wait, wait...So let me get this straight.So SpaceX has launched a grand total of 6 rockets, first three failed. And only the last two were paying customers, and they are already profitable?So two paying customers covered their entire development and operating costs and profit on top? And where can I get in on this high payback scam, sorry I mean business?

And Richard Branson needs to be taking notes seeing that the first two customers of his suborbital flight stint will turn it into instant money tree.

Wait, wait, wait...So let me get this straight.So SpaceX has launched a grand total of 6 rockets, first three failed. And only the last two were paying customers, and they are already profitable?

They are profitable according to rules that the IRS has given to any business that engages in similar kinds of contracts. Money has been paid as a deposit for many of those flights, and hardware has been built for a great many of those rockets. That those rockets haven't flown yet is sort of a risk that those who are booking these flights are taking, but the recent successes that SpaceX has demonstrated seems to have paid off handsomely.

I'll accept that critisism as soon as you can explain to me what is so worthwhile about gaining increasingly more value and wealth? He's already rich. Does it matter if he is turning a profit if he is able to continue doing many great things?

And by most outward indicators, the man doesn't even know how to fail.

Elon Musk came pretty damn close to folding up shop completely and needing to pull the plug on all of his companies. At one point he had no liquid assets of any kind and was technically bankrupt (about two years ago). If the article is to be believed mentioned in the original post, Elon invested in a Silicon Valley startup called Everdream (I've never heard of it, but Elon Musk was a major shareholder and initial investor) and that gave Elon Musk the liquid capital to float Tesla Motors past the initial s

These two aren't antonyms, nor even mutually exclusive. I would agree that profit-seeking is a nearly ubiquitous goal of industrialists, but that is not the defining characteristic. Being involved in industry is.

Being an "industrialist" doesn't require seeking a profit anymore than a "business" requires profit. There are certainly "non-profit businesses", and the phrase "non-profit industry" should be familiar to most here.

Industrialists don't have to be robber barons in order to be industrialists.

they would like to make money, musk would like to make money, the railroad robber barons of old, the iconic image that pops to mind when i think industrialist, they would have liked to make money when they started a business venture

but they frequently lost their shirt. you wouldn't call them philanthropists because they spent a fortune to build a railroad line that promptly went bankrupt

likewise, if musk makes no money, he's not a philanthropist. he just started

PayPal is profitable. Space-X is profitable. Tesla just needs to get their production volume up.

(Why is the factory being described as "insane"? It looks like a modern auto factory, although on the small side. The Space-X factory is interesting, because it doesn't look like a NASA operation. It looks like an aircraft factory. Space-X boosters can be set on their side and don't need a clean room for the whole booster. They made a decision to have a little more weight to get a more rugged item, and it seems

The "hyperloop" is not a launch loop, as I at first suspected. He describes it as

some sort of tube capable of taking someone from downtown San Francisco to Los Angeles in 30 minutes.

, so some sort of high-speed-rail-killer. First thought -- a brachistochrone-like evacuated tunnel?

Of course a cycloid, the true brachistochrone, would be too deep (~350 miles distance, so it'd be about 100 miles deep), possibly too much acceleration for comfort, and rather faster... It's a well-known proof (a classic example problem in typical 1st-year graduate maths or physics, if not undergraduate) that a frictionless strai

Considering the only evidence of that is a google street view picture of a hummer parked on the street next to his place, but not parked behind the gate on the actual property, you may be reading too much into things.

Such high innovation high risk activities used to be way more common till the 1980s. Look around you, Home Computers were made long before anybody believed there was a market for them, yet in the 1970s many companies just made and sold them. They did sell and a new industry was born.

Unfortunately that is a lot rarer now. Company only develop and build devices which are already proven to have a market. That's why there are virtually no new devices out there. The mobile device market, for example, is now more boring than it ever was. Virtually all the devices are precisely the same.